After a silver halide photographic light-sensitive material is exposed to light, it is subjected to color development processing, whereby an aromatic primary amine developing agent oxidized by silver halide reacts with dye forming couplers to form a color image.
Generally, in this process, color reproduction by a subtractive process is frequently used. In order to reproduce blue, green and red colors, yellow, magenta and cyan color images which are complement colors, respectively, are formed.
As the cyan color image forming couplers, phenols or naphthols are often used. However, there are some problems in preservation stability of color images obtained from the phenols and naphthols heretofore used. For example, color images obtained from 2-acylaminophenol cyan couplers described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,367,531, 2,369,929, 2,423,730 and 2,801,171 are generally inferior in fastness to heat. Color images obtained from 2,5-diacylaminophenol cyan couplers described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,772,162 and 2,895,826 are generally inferior in fastness to light, and 1-hydroxy-2-naphthamide cyan couplers are generally insufficient in fastness to both light and heat (particularly, wet heating).
On the other hand, phenol couples described in U.S. Pat. Nos.3,772,002 have fairly improved fastness to heat, but they are insufficient in preservation for a long period of time including fastness to light, and they have a fault in that the cyan density is greatly reduced in case of using a fatigued bleach-fix solution.